Mitt Romney wants to talk about the economy. But his ostensible allies keep interrupting him, and his own party is threatening to drown him out. A reality of modern campaigning is that any candidate — even one as buttoned-down and disciplined as Romney — has to contend with stronger political crosswinds than in the past. The news that a conservative super PAC is contemplating an attack on President Obama’s association with the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright has lit the political world on fire. (You can read the full document here.) But there’s plenty of reason to think such an attack simply wouldn’t work. Eager to avoid any setbacks that would distract the president’s attention from the U.S. economy in an election year, the Obama administration hopes to use a pair of summits with foreign leaders this weekend to develop some consensus around an international response to both the European debt crisis and the war in Afghanistan. Rep. Trent Franks’s district in suburban Phoenix is two time zones away from Washington, a fact not lost on D.C. leaders as the Arizona Republican presided Thursday over the latest in a long series of attempts to control social issues in the nation’s capital. Jennifer Dinoia’s blog, pulled from a State Department blogroll following an intimate posting on her reconstructive surgery after breast cancer, is back in its prominent spot on the agency’s Web site. “The Dinoia Family,” which has featured the Foreign Service spouse’s journey through a breast cancer diagnosis at 39 as her husband was on a solo tour in Iraq, reappeared Thursday on the State Department-sanctioned site, hours after The Post reported that it had disappeared. Mitt Romney is catching up in the race for campaign cash. Romney and the Republican National Committee, which is spending money on behalf of the Republican candidate, brought in $40.1 million during April, according to a campaign statement. That’s just shy of the $43.6 million raised by the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee during the same period. Americans Elect, a group that set out to secure ballot access for a yet-to-be-named centrist presidential candidate, has thrown in the towel. After spending $35 million to create an online nomination process and petition for a line on the ballot in more than half the states — the group’s leaders acknowledged Thursday that they couldn’t find a candidate.
“If you are a family making less than $250,000 a year, your taxes will not go up.” (quote from President Obama, 2008)
“Promise broken: Obamacare raises 18 different taxes.”
“If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” (quote from Obama, 2009)
Rush Limbaugh has no idea what I think. Nor does he know that many feminists want me drummed out of the corps as “anti-choice” and “a water-carrier for the bishops” who “too often gives Republicans the benefit of the doubt.” The Democratic National Committee is aggressively pushing back against the idea that it is not doing enough to help the effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin, insisting that the party is marshalling its considerable grassroots and turnout operation to aid Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.
Third-party group calls it quits, Mitt Romney to air his first general election ad, another birther rumor is debunked and Gary Johnson shoots a watermelon.
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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is not returning calls from the Ricketts family and is “livid” over a New York Times report that Joe Ricketts commissioned a proposal for a multimillion-dollar ad campaign linking President Obama to the president’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, according to an Emanuel aide. Mitt Romney will spend another day criss-crossing Florida, trying to best the $40 million April fundraising total his campaign announced Thursday morning, while President Obama has no public events scheduled. As our colleagues at the Fix wrote last month, Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod and top Romney campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom have had some notable debates in 140-character bursts. The two senior aides publicly sparred over such high-level topics as what Mitt Romney has in common with a TV show and a child’s toy and whether President Obama would eat his pet. On MSNBC Wednesday, House Assistant Democratic Leader James Clyburn (S.C.) accused House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and congressional Republicans of turning the raising of the country’s debt ceiling into “a made-up issue.” GREENSBORO, N.C. — He was either a masterful manipulator or he was masterfully manipulated. John Edwards couldn’t be both when it came to Andrew Young, the campaign lackey who isn’t so unimportant anymore. Even after four weeks of courtroom tension, after 31 witnesses and reams of exhibits, it is the curiously cozy, then brutally nasty relationship between these two men that gives shape and weight to one of the most unusual political corruption cases ever to occupy a docket. The Obama administration granted a visa this week to the daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro but rejected visas for nearly a dozen other Cubans to attend an academic conference in California, angering both conservative Cuban American leaders and American scholars seeking to improve U.S.-Cuban academic ties. It’s never easy to re-enter the dating pool after years away — probably especially so if you’re one of the most famous men in the world. But things seem to have worked out for Al Gore. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former VP has a serious girlfriend, we’ve learned. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which polices corporations, can usually count on support from Democrats and a rougher reception from Republicans. But, on Thursday, the agency found an issue on which its traditional friends are its critics and its traditional critics are its friends. As part of a year-end budget deal, House Republicans are urging adoption of “fast-track procedures” to force lawmakers to complete a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. tax code in 2013. House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said Thursday that he has two goals with respect to the tax code: “One, block massive, job-killing tax increases” at the end of the year, when the George W. Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire. “And two, enact — not just pass — comprehensive tax reform.” “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned,” said President Obama in his 2012 State of the Union address, “doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” It was a “rah-rah America!” applause line for a president who needed to get the assembled Republicans out of their seats a few times over the course of the evening. But the line works literally, too. Whenever someone tells me that the United States is in decline, I have no idea what they’re talking about. And neither, I tend to think, do they. Neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin from a very close range, according to documents a Florida prosecutor released Thursday that indicate a hand-to-hand struggle occurred before the teenager was killed. On a gorgeous spring Thursday, kids on class trips were all over the Capitol grounds, many in matching T-shirts, posing for pictures on the granite steps. They were having a great time learning history and about how government works. If they had crossed Independence Avenue and squeezed into a Cannon House Office Building hearing room, they also would have witnessed how government is not supposed to work. The U.S. Postal Service, facing mounting losses, said Thursday it is moving ahead with plans to close hundreds of mail sorting hubs and cannot wait for Congress to pass legislation to help it out of its financial hole. As a white girl growing up in the 1970s South, I loved Donna Summer. It was a place that was still segregated – as much as people wanted to pretend it wasn’t – but Summer’s music bonded black and white kids. We’d stand at the Big Banjo’s juke box and play “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls.” As kids, we probably shouldn’t have even been listening to such racy lyrics, but it was carefree disco after all. That music allowed us to dance together even if we didn’t hang out at school together. On a vote that fell largely along party lines, the House of Representatives has approved a GOP measure reauthorizing the expired Violence Against Women Act — the latest issue that was once the subject of broad bipartisan agreement in Washington to fall victim to election year politics. Newspaper and television reporters working a story often sweat it out, desperately waiting for someone, anyone, to say something that gives them the perfect quote or anecdote. Now we come to find out — who knew? — that all those perfect “man on the street” (MOS) quotes in campaign ads are actually fed to sincere and earnest American “voters” — or actors. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) has announced that Richard Fontaine will be the think tank’s new president. Fontaine, who has served as a CNAS senior adviser and senior fellow, will take up the new post immediately.
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